Almost anywhere you went in Asian legal circles over the past year, conversation would inevi-tably turn to one topic: what’s going onwith all the recruitment by the U.S. firmsin Hong Kong?

Several elite New York firms, previously content to practice only U.S. law
in the Asian financial capital, launched
Hong Kong law practices over the past
year. They did it mainly by poaching
from the British firms that traditionally
have dominated the work, and they did
it in fairly rapid succession, at least for
firms known for hiring conservatively.
Davis Polk & Wardwell made its move
in the fall of 2010; Cleary Gottlieb Steen
& Hamilton last December; Simpson
Thacher & Bartlett this past April; and
Sullivan & Cromwell in June.

The legal market in Singapore is booming,
but not all of the movement is inbound.
True, international firms have been eager
to set up shop in the bustling city-state at
the tip of the Malay Peninsula. However,
Singapore-based firms have expansion
plans of their own. There is a growing need
for corporate lawyers in Southeast Asia,
and Singapore’s four largest local firms—
Allen & Gledhill, Drew & Napier, Rajah
& Tann, and WongPartnership—want to
meet that demand too.

Rajah & Tann has had the biggest geographic expansion of the local firms. In
September it announced the opening of its
two newest outposts. Both the Bangkok
office, with six attorneys, and the Ho Chi
Minh City office, with four, will have local
law capabilities. Rajah & Tann already has
offices in Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, and
Vientiane, and managing partner Lee Eng

Beng says that the 300-lawyer firm is currently looking to expand into Cambodia
and Indonesia.

Beng explains that the expansion has
been driven by a surge in intra-Asian transactions. He adds that it’s time for Asian
firms to not just gain prominence in their
home country, but to compete with the big
names in international law that have been
moving into the region.

WongPartnership is also expanding.
Last year it set up shop in Shanghai, its
second office in China after Beijing. The
firm also has two Middle East branches,
in Doha and Abu Dhabi. According to
managing partner Rachel Eng, the firm
has grown from 50 partners to 270 over
the past nine years. Eng says the firm’s
Singapore-based partners are starting to
travel extensively to nearby countries, particularly Indonesia and India. She explains

now mainly seek international capital in
the city, which has outpaced other major
financial centers in initial public offerings the past three years. Adding a local
law practice is a hedge against the possibility that deals of the future may have
little U.S. law component, or that capital
markets clients will seek one-stop shops.

Chen notes the added challenge for
the New York firms has been to not just
hire laterals, but to rely on them for a
whole new practice. With a U.S. capital
markets lawyer like himself, Simpson can
call upon the firm’s institutional knowledge about American securities law in
assessing and backing up his work. There

WILLIAM RIESER

that Singapore has particularly high legal
standards that its attorneys want to bring
into other Asian countries.

Drew & Napier, which has around 140
lawyers, has an office in Malaysia and an
Indonesia arm of its intellectual property
practice. Deputy managing director Sin
Boon Ann says that the firm tried to establish outposts in China and Vietnam, but
later decided to back off and do foreign
work from inside Singapore. He adds that
because Singapore uses common law,
many Asian companies choose the country
as their home base so that they can use
the Western legal system to form businesses and write contracts.

Allen & Gledhill, which has around 300
lawyers, has chosen a slightly more conservative expansion strategy. It does not
have a presence outside of the city, but it
does have a ten-year Singapore joint law